


Yanked Awry

by recrudescence



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M, Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 20:48:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/pseuds/recrudescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like a trick, an excellent prank, getting away with something extraordinary and no one the wiser. Co-starring nostalgia, exhibitionism, and herbs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yanked Awry

**Author's Note:**

> Contains consensual underage sex, consensual CSI, and other generally kinky stuff that makes me think I should probably not start writing fic while listening to a dance remix of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme.

Tangled up in a blanket, River’s head on the arm of the couch and her legs tucked in to keep from jostling Simon where he’s reading on the other side of her.

Seemingly napping, but he always could tell when she was actually awake and bored.

  
\--

_“Injured in the line of duty,” says River, gravely patting his shoulder._

Simon tries to nod, his face contorted. “We need to start looking for somewhere to hide before the shelling starts again. Unless the comms survived the blast and we can get a wave out.”

Around them, the garden is immaculate, but as far as they’re concerned, the Tam estate is a gutted battlefield of military blues and browns and shining steel weapons. The Independents launched a surprise attack and now the two of them are the only ones left from their battalion.

River shakes her head. “No good. We’ll never be able to contact anyone for help with all our supplies burned up. Better run.”

  
\--

Fidgeting and stretching, River rubbing a heel against his lap, making him raise his eyebrows and lose his place.

“All right, what is it?” Catching a thin ankle in one hand, holding it in place. He knows a plea for attention when he sees one.

Blanket over her head like a nubby yellow bridal veil as she sits up, grins, and kisses him on the cheek. Pawing the book aside and taking over his body as easily as she does his focus, pushing at his shoulder like a kitten batting a ball of yarn. “Stop being boring.”

She’s smiling, she’s lucid, she’s _shoving _at him, and Simon just smiles and shoves her right back. Play-fighting on the couch, her skirt coming up and his hand stealing up, just a fleeting caress up behind a knee, where she’s ticklish, but she hums and pushes herself against him, making that hand slide higher. Simon’s mouth coming open as hers smiles beatifically, long lashes flitting against her cheeks. A hand up between her legs, feeling nothing but skin and slickness under that many-layered skirt. “River…” warningly.

Grazing a finger _up _and between, wetness and heat encasing the tip as he moves it back and forth, stroking in a manner that could almost pass for chaste on any other part of her body. She wriggles down onto him, limbs tensing, apple-cheeked. “It isn’t time for dinner yet,” she says pragmatically, as if that alone vouchsafes against interruptions.

“This still isn’t the _place_,” Simon begins, and his voice is at least as breathy as hers.

A palm clapped over his mouth, a conspiratorial flash in dark eyes. “No one can know,” she whispers, working deftly at his pants and slipping a slim hand through the fly. Little damp curl of her tongue along his neck, her fingers around his cock, making his mouth part and his spine snap straight.

  
\--

_Having to live off the land, since that’s just what runaways and outlaws and sole survivors of Independent attacks_ do,_ trapping animals and harvesting wild plants to survive._

The too-smart Tam children, hiding behind manicured hedges, knighting each other with a makeshift maple-branch swordpoints on their shoulders. River having Simon braid her hair because their mother pulls too much, she says, and Simon always takes his time. More at ease with one another than friends their own ages, sketching out alternate lifetimes and playing centuries-dead games that no one else could understand.

“You could still be a doctor in the woods, if you wanted,” his sister declares. “It wouldn’t make you money, but it would make you powerful.”

Simon downloads data and they spin it into stories.

“Herbs with selenium have even been known to make hair healthier,” he explains. River loves learning the names and properties of them all, so Simon picks the best to read aloud. He tells her about using adder’s tongue for internal bleeding, vervain tea for aches and fevers, dragon’s blood sap to ward off infections, tian nan xing_ and ginger for phlegm._

“There’s one called river beauty,” he says, looking up.

“What does that one do?”

“Gives you a horrible plague, makes you break out in enormous boils, and then scratch yourself till your fingers fall off.”

She sticks out her tongue and wrestles the tablet away from him in order to read it herself.

They could make it on their own if they chose, if they ever had to. “I’m sure of it,” River says.

  
\--

Sitting with his sister on his lap, River looking sweet and small and desperately in need of comfort to anyone who might see. Anyone who might come by and find them there in the lounge area by the galley, there in plain sight with River’s skirt and the blanket spread over them both, and Simon _inside _her. Petting her hair, murmuring into her ear, just as he would if she really were having an episode. Telling her to be good, to be careful, to listen. “_Mei-mei_, you’ll have to be very quiet.”

“Always,” she answers winningly.

He notices the way her hair smells like apricots and his own infirmary. Vibrant and summer-bright, but medicated down to a manageable level; his sister doesn’t like it, but she tolerates it. They still have so much to learn. River shifts maddeningly and hums with pride when Simon swears softly. “No nightmares for a long time now,” she says. “Please?”

  
\--

_Amaranth stain on her lips, pinched from their mother’s vanity, along with a seemingly infinite number of kerchiefs._

Today, River is an espionage virtuoso posing as a dancer and Simon is being interrogated. He refuses to tell her all his secrets, just like he’s supposed to, and listens as River pensively reels off an impressively graphic list of torture methods. Mostly, he just watches her dance. More graceful than any of the professional performances he’s ever seen; more enthralling than any of the bars he’s heard older boys talk about, full of chorus girls with wan smiles and worn skirts.

They end with Simon spectacularly dying on the good armchair in the sitting room, and then the two of them go downstairs for tea and noodles, River shedding scarves and skirts and perching on his lap, becoming his sister again.

Creeping into bed with him and whispering back and forth, still a habit even though Simon knows he’s too old now and should put an end to it. Knows also that he never will. River had known about hormones before he had himself, matter-of-factly offering information that made him cover his eyes and throw up his hands.

River, moving against him in her sleep, smiling muzzily, saying she wants to see. The two of them practicing kissing and touching on one another, mingling minds and bodies until there’s nothing left to learn. Another way of exploring and storytelling, embellishing a custom-built world accommodating no one but them. They’ve grown very good at keeping secrets.

Sleeping with satin pillows under his head and River curled up warmly next to him, loosened braids snaking over his arm.

  
\--

Like a trick, an excellent prank, getting away with something extraordinary and no one the wiser.

River loves her mischief and Simon loves seeing glimpses of that, of who she had once been, though it doesn’t escape him even now that River’s brilliant ideas landed both of them in trouble more than once. Years ago, before the Academy was ever mentioned.

Tight and slick and squirming like a fish or a dream, just out of his grasp. His bare ass against the cushions, her little fingers reaching back and plucking up under the hem of his sweater, and Simon can’t see straight, let alone think.

Then…nothing. And River freezing suddenly, wide-eyed and guileless, just in time for Simon to catch sight of Zoe coming by.

“Evening. She all right?” She has to be noticing River looking flushed and disoriented, and it’s all Simon can do to keep from choking as he quickly reassures her that, yes, everything’s fine.

River shifting on his lap, legs parting and back arching, innocently as if she really is stretching out after a nap, making him slip in a little deeper. Slender thighs opening farther, nothing on under the dress to begin with. She’d _planned _it, the little brat. He can tell she’s trying not to giggle at him for being so slow on the uptake.

Zoe’s saying that she seems a little warm, reaching out as if to finger the edge of the blanket, and Simon nearly dies on the spot. “She’s just woken up, that’s all,” he answers, as coolly and casually as he can.

“You know best, doctor.”

“He does,” nods River. Serious and self-assured, would never know her brother had a finger subtly working over the heated slip of her clit, there under the blanket.

Zoe smiles, takes a protein bar, and leaves. Far too slowly.

  
\--

_Her last night at home, before leaving for the Academy. He comes home from MedAcad for the weekend in order to help see her off._

A striped nightgown pulled over her head and his mouth on her everywhere, making her whimper and plead, making her shimmer with sweat and shiver for more. Two fingers curled and stroking inside her before she presses her face into a pillow and mutely guides him into giving her everything. He always does.

“I’m still too excited to sleep,” she tells him afterward, once they’ve cleaned up and settled back down.

Simon can see the gleam of her grin through the darkness. His thumb sketches a spiral on her cheek. “Aren’t you going to miss me?”

“Not a bit.”

He pinches her and she yelps before pinching him back.

  
\--

He treats her carefully now, delicate kisses on her forehead, cautious hands stroking her head, and sometimes River snaps from it. In her way. Does things to remind him she’s still the same person, down below the raw nerve endings and nonsensical words.

It’s teaching her improper behavior, he tells himself, teaching her the wrong idea about time and place and appropriateness, but his sister turns her head then and smiles like sin. The smile that led to so many of the scrapes that got them both punished as children. The smile that says, yes, she knows better, but just can’t resist making trouble sometimes.

They both know better. Silver-spooned childhoods, ceaselessly voracious minds, the best educations money can buy, and then some. It hasn’t stopped them before.

River on fire, a girl-shaped flame under his hands, trying to kiss under his chin. So responsive, always to this, to him, the purest kind of affection. Like stepping through a boarded-up door only to discover his old room behind it, like being able to convey full sentences across the dinner table with nothing more than a glance. Simon mindlessly _shhh_ing over the tiny sounds that quiver on River’s tongue and catch like claws on his skin, sliding a hand up the front of her dress, under her slip, finding a pointed nipple and pinching slowly. Nipping the edge of her ear as his eyes dart everywhere, guarding and monitoring. A small breast in each of his hands, nipples between his fingertips and River whimpering and surging on his lap.

He presses up with his hips, strokes a hand back down over her middle and rubs with his fingertip there, makes his little sister crumple and curve and cry out against him, pale hands curled in the soft-woven blanket and bunching up her dress. Simon kisses the top of her head, rocks in time to her trembling, tells her that everything is all right. They can debate the point later.

The ultimate game: working to right a multitude of wrongs, as blindly as grabbing randomly plucked plants out of the ground and. Adventure is much less savory when it actually happens, living the life of a renegade, poor and uncertain, not having a safe home to return to at the end of the day. But the closeness, that much is still the same. He clutches both arms around her, shuddering, and sighs into her hair—sosoquietly, can’t spill any more secrets than he already has—feels her small hands petting soothingly along his own tightly fisted ones.

Delicate fingers working one open, interlocking with his. He’s always given her everything.

“I missed you,” she murmurs, and Simon doesn’t need to see her face to understand.


End file.
